Goth is easy enough to dis, what with the spooky stuff it seems to entail, but studies of late seem show it in a much more positive light, funny as that might sound. I stumbled across this review in the Chronicle of Higher Education while browsing through Arts and Letters Daily. Professor Mikita Brottman reviews Contemporary Gothic, by Catherine Spooner (Reaktion Books), and Goth: Undead Subculture, edited by Lauren M.E. Goodlad and Michael Bibby (Duke University Press) and considers some of the reasons why goth, unlike other ‘youth’ cultures, refuses to die. (Yes, I am aware of how many jokes and puns are just waiting to be made there.) Some snippets:

Goth obviously emerged from punk, but punk didn’t last. The same is true of most subcultures: Hippies are old hat; skinheads have come and gone; grunge is yesterday’s news. Why does goth alone remain undead?
…
According to Spooner’s book, the consistent allure of goth lies in the way it achieves a balance between different kinds of contradictions — “the grotesque and incorporeal, authentic self-expression and campiness, mass popularity and cult appeal, comfort and outrage.” Bibby and Goodlad put it differently, pointing out that goth has a “complex relation to subculture,” or, in the words of one contributor, the self-proclaimed Modern Goth Rebecca Schraffenberger, “there are as many ways of being goth as there are goths out there.” In other words, goth can be anything you want it to be, from the theme of tonight’s party to an entire way of life.
…
There are goth clubs and pubs, goth movies (anything by David Lynch, Tim Burton, or Ed Wood seems to fit the bill), goth jewelry and fashion, goth-friendly home décor, even goth lingerie. Within its own confines, too, goth embraces contradictions; it contains multitudes. Hair can be long or short, flat or spiky; shoes can be heavy boots or light slippers with pointy toes. And while individual goths can be totally asexual or polymorphously perverse, goth itself breeds peacefully with other subcultures, producing such independent offspring as gothabilly, doom metal, gothic Lolita, cybergoth, and goth ‘n’ roll.
…
…Anyone can be a goth; you don’t need to run in a pack (goths are traditionally loners). And, as teenage subcultures go, it’s unusually quiet and friendly. Goths are generally hygienic; their piercings are clean and discreet; they don’t stick dirty safety pins through their noses or ride around on motorbikes spitting and swearing.

…when you have tickets to see the Police in concert. Oh yes. Six months from now, but holy @#$%^&**&^%$# I’m going to actually see the actual Police in actual concert. Fourteen-year-old-me would have killed for this. Current me is pretty over the moon too. We forked out for the mid-range tickets – nosebleed seats when you want to see the drummer just won’t work.

This is turning out pretty awesome, really. We get to Oz and Pearl Jam turn up, then the Cure decide to pop back in after 5 years away, and then the Police not only get back together but come down to Melbourne before the year is out. Add the Transformers movie to the mix and I’m reliving 1983-1997, only on fast-forward and at full volume. Which doesn’t work on video (remember those?) I know, but does in real life. I think. Whatever. I’m happy.

Now to come up with a viable PhD proposal…

So they’re at it again. The “Islamists” at the red/yellow/pink mosque in Islamabad. The government in its infinite wisdom reopened it for Friday prayers and promptly had a riot on their hands. The images on BBC World were just awful, but confirm that, in situations like this, while their reporting is fairly even-handed, they opt for the most bogeymen-like images they can get. Over and over, they showed footage of this lunatic with a beard down to his stomach punching the air so hard he kept falling over. Whatever the reporter was saying, whatever other innocuous images they showed, this is the one that’ll stick because it’s the one closest to what the terms ‘fundamentalist’, ‘Islamist’, ‘terrorist’ all conjure up.

It had the required effect on us too, scaring us into calling our families in Islamabad. But when my brother-in-law finally got through to us, it was just to say that he’d seen the news reports on TV, figured we’d have freaked out, and wanted us not to worry - that what looked like the entire city going to hell was a couple of blocks in one corner and that life was going on as usual in the rest of the city. That was a relief, but I figured I should still call my brother who lives only a few kilometres from the Lal Masjid. Turns out he didn’t know there had been a bombing at all. He knew about the Friday prayers being suspended and the government-appointed Maulvi being kicked out, and had heard an explosion, but that was it. Why?

His cable was out.

That’s not to say the situation itself isn’t awful because it doesn’t affect my family or my neighborhood or the majority of the population of the city, but it does put the media caterwauling in perspective. I can understand the reporters on the scene being shaken though - the BBC person was only a few yards from the explosion and other local reporters have been unable to say much except how much blood they can see and how many pieces of those closest to the bomb are scattered about – and this is only going to make the tension between the government and the fundos worse. But it’s still just a symptom. The bigger problem is still unaddressed and will probably continue to be so.

Despite the media crap, Pakistan is still on the fence about a lot of things. Yes, there’s a funamentalist government in the NWFP (the province that, joy and happiness, borders Afghanistan), but in five years, they have been unable to implement any meaningful legislation. Yes, they’ve turned off TVs in public places. Big whoop. The area was conservative to begin with.

And speaking of TV, because of Musharraf, the media is now more free than it has ever been; so much so that the goverment cannot prevent it from turning on Mush now. That is fantastic not just because of the free media song-and-dance but because it means that at least some part of society isn’t entirely dependent on the will of one person. That’s a first in the history of the country.

But despite the fact that I’d vote for Mush over the other clowns vying for power if it came down to that, he’s on his way out. He has to be – he’s messed up too badly to not go. And that’ll coincide nicely with Bush’s exit, so that the popular view that the army leadership gets its orders from the US (and is therefore on a quest to exterminate all Muslims – a view that the Lal Masjid situation will go a long way towards perpetuating) will not taint the next administration. Convenient, no? But then again there’s that execrable bill being proposed in the US that will give financial aid to Pakistan based on its performance in the ‘war against terror’. (Dance, monkey, dance!) If it goes through, our next collective of charlatans may have some fast talking to do. Given that one is barely literate and the other unable to speak a language the population of the country can understand, that should be very interesting indeed.

Some time before the summer between eighth and ninth grade, I started to volunteer at my junior high school library. I shelved books, checked books out and in, sorted index cards, and did all the other things you do to help keep a library running. In exchange, I got first dibs on all the books that were discarded at the end of the year. I think my haul that summer was about 120 books. Most were tattered and dog-eared and quite a few fell apart before the year was out, but what an amazing find. I’d been a good little overachiever and was already familiar with all the ‘serious’ authors my anglophile upbringing required I know, so nobody objected to my bringing home this ‘young adult’ stuff. I was free to read all I wanted. And boy did I read. Science fiction, fantasy, biography, horror, suspense, mysteries, mythology, poetry, and books that were simply about kids growing up. I’ve forgotten all but a few of the authors’ names, but I always imagined them to be magical beings, almost. Adults who could somehow bridge the gap between their grow-up selves and the kids they used to be and who could use this amazing ability to tell other kids trying to muddle through this whole growing up thing that we’d make it to the other side ok. Most adults I knew at the time couldn’t do that. Most I know now still can’t. Like me, they got to the other side and just kept going.

And I might have kept on going had I not met a few people through my MA who still have that magic about them. I’ve spoken of Penni Russon before – she’s written the amazing Undine trilogy, Undine, Breathe and Drift and has other projects underway – but this semester I also met Jennifer Cook. Soon after meeting her, and having just come off the fantastic ride that Penni’s books had taken me on the previous year, I decided that I absolutely had to read her books as well. So, the day I handed in my thesis, I headed over to the library and picked up Ariadne: The Maiden and the Minotaur.

Now the thing about this book is that it’s not like anything I’ve ever read. And I’ll bet it’s not like anything you’ve ever read either. Having been ‘into’ mythology aeons ago, I knew the story of the Minotaur and of Ariadne and Theseus and I was curious to see what Jen had done with it. I was expecting a strong female voice. I was expecting something written for smart thirteen- to sixteen-year-olds. I was expecting something exciting and eventually empowering. And I have to say Jen delivered on all of these things. But the thing about Jen, speaking as someone who has the priviledge of being able to call her ‘Jen’, is that she does everything in a way that is absolutely, unmistakeably, uncompromisingly her own. You sit up and notice when you meet her. And you sure as hell sit up and notice when you read her.

Ariadne begins with a girl, sixteen and dumped. Yes, it’s thousands of years ago and she’s on a stony island in the middle of the Aegean Sea, but that’s not the point. The point is she’s angry and from the get-go you know you don’t want to get in her way. Her heart may be broken, but she isn’t and from the story, you get the feeling she won’t be, no matter what the gods throw at her. She’ll get bruised and battered – she already has after all – but she’s the sort who cusses her head off at fate and keeps going. She may be the daughter of a king and the granddaughter of gods, but our Ari is no ‘princess’. Yes, as the blurb on the back and the prologue will tell you, she’s had it a bit rough the last few days and does need “a good lie down”, but you know, you just know, that she’s going to get up again and come out swinging.

The book consists of the story of the events that led Ariadne to this desolate island and is written in Ariadne’s voice. No hemming and hawing for this princess though. She calls a spade a spade and often much worse, and I have to say that the book deserves prizes for the inventiveness of the cussing alone. It is hilarious and so real that you forget at times that you’re actually in “Mythical Greece”.

And that’s the beauty of it. Behind the hilarity and the fantastically indignant voice that Jen weilds so effortlessly is the incredibly meticulous and ultimately convincing retelling – re-weaving, really – of a story as old as Western culture. It is fascinating to watch as the King and Queen of Crete, for example, are shown not just in all their terrible mythical glory but in their role as parents. Jen explores the relationship that Pasiphae and Minos have with their daughter and, for the first time, you see them as real people with real problems and worries and duties and obligations and fears and jealousies and all the rest of it. You see how they (and by extension, we) set traps for themselves and paint themselves into corners. But while you’re reading all this, somehow, at the same time, Jen makes sure you are aware of the politics at work, of the cultural landscape of the age.

Ultimately, yes, this is a book about a girl finding her way into womanhood and working out her relationship with her mother, with her legacy, with other women, and with what it means to be a woman in any age. That’s plenty already, but Ariadne manages to be more than that as well. By the time you read the last page you’ve travelled so far and back that it’s hard to believe the book is actually only 200 pages long. There’s the incredible tale of the Minotaur and the story of Theseus’s battle with the beast, there’s the story of Ariadne’s sister Phaedra and their relationship, there’s the story of how Ariadne ends up on the island. And then there’s the ‘real’ version of all these events, as told by an Ariadne who will brook no romanticised nonsense in the telling of her tale. And I can’t think of a better, more magical person to tell it than Jen Cook.

I handed in my thesis a few minutes ago and I want to collapse. Or sleep. Sleep would be good too. Instead of being all elated and relieved, I’m feeling quite bereft. I want it back. I want to do it over. Not because what I handed in, despite its pretentious title, is bad, but because I just want to go again. Orientation for semester 2 has just started, which is aggravating the the whole nostalgia thing. I want to be at that end of it again. But that’s what the PhD’s for, right? Right. Here’s hoping!

It is amazing how Penni always manages to distract me at just the right moment. This time its 8 things about yours truly. Yes, I know. Fascinating stuff, isn’t it? But first, the rules:

• each player lists 8 facts about themselves 
• the rules of the game appear before the facts do
• the player ends by tagging 8 people, which means listing their names and then going to their blogs to tell them that they’ve been tagged, then going back and commenting on their lists.

1. Nothing in the world melts my heart faster than a dog. Big, little, puppy, grown up, recognizable breed, mutt, whatever. I go from a relatively articulate post-grad to a jibbering, cooing, baby-talking fool at the sight of a dog, regardless of where I am when I see it. People on the tram have been known to move away. 
2. I hate wearing socks inside the house because they feel funny in my slippers and on the carpet. And they feel funny because I never had to wear any when my dog was alive – he had a habit of sitting under my chair or as close to me as possible, which made it easy for me to slip my feet under him when they got cold. German Shepherds beat socks any day.
3. Some people’s singing voices make the bones in my forearms itch. Their speaking voices are fine though.
4. I remember the layout of every house I have ever lived in, except the one in Colombo because we left when I was only about 16 months old.
5. I can understand more Turkish than my parents realize.
6. I’m scared I won’t be able to learn all the languages I want to learn.
7. I’m afraid of medication and won’t even take pain pills unless absolutely necessary.
8. I love people who challenge gender/sexual identity because it just goes to show how artificial and socially constructed our concept of it is in the first place.

On to tagging. As it happens, I don’t think I know enough people…Eunice and Ameel for starters. Miriam–or Nome, rather since he does the blogging. Roy, if he gets around to blogging. Sin and Kyla too, because I like them.

I’m almost done with my thesis. So almost-done, in fact, that I watched the Transformers movie yesterday. I think there may be spoilers in the following post, although there’s really nothing new about the storyline.

Wow. I was kind of expecting it to suck. I really was. But while there were loose threads galore and some of the acting was a bit overdone, I thought (but then how else are you supposed react to giant robots from outer space?), it really was ol’ Optimus and the gang. Sure he wasn’t a MAC truck like in the cartoons (all the cars are General Motors models) and had an unnecessarily bright paint job, but the voice was him and it gave me goosebumps just like it used to back when I was five years old.

I love this movie. Not because it’s a particularly great story since we’ve heard it all before, but because, in a way, it was like going to see your favorite band play. You’re not going there to get to know their music but because you already know it and them and now you want to see them up close, doing what they do. I’ll admit I teared up a bit when the Autobots appeared and when Bumble Bee first transformed and when Jazz died and when Ironhide wanted to kill that stupid chihuahua and when Bumble Bee kept fighting and when they did the whole motorcade sequence on the way to the big battle – every couple of minutes, in short. The humans were ok too, although you really shouldn’t put John Turturro in a scene with nobodies because he steals it completely. You know the other actors are there, and that you’re supposed to be on their side, but he’s such a presence that it’s hard to remember all that. The man could do a movie entirely by himself and I’ll bet nobody would notice that there weren’t any other actors there with him.

I’ll probably go back to see it a few times since I want to see them again (‘them’ being the Autobots, although I’ve always had a bit of a soft spot for Starscream as well. I seem to remember him helping out the ‘bots at some point so he’s a borderline baddie.). The action sequences are really well done and I love that the noise they made when they transformed in the cartoon is still there, even if it’s been updated a bit. Yep, this was totally a rollercoaster ride down memory lane, but with more ups than downs, really.